Bücher veröffentlicht von Faber & Faber

First published in 1939, On Russian Music was conceived by Gerald Abraham as a sequel to his earlier Studies in Russian Music (1935, also in Faber Finds), and complements the previous work in many useful respects. Glinka moves to the forefront via close study of both of his operas. A historical account of the composition of Borodin's Prince Igor enriches the critical study made in the first book. And chapters on Mlada and Tsar Saltan round out Abraham's appreciations of the major operas of Rimsky-Korsakov.There are also critical and historical essays on works by Mussorgsky, Dargom,zhsky, Tchaikovsky and other composers, and analyses that, in their time, threw new light on the programmatic meaning of such well-known compositions as Scheherazade and the Path,tique symphony. The book is superbly illustrated with music examples throughout.

Nicholas Wiseman was not yet 26 years of age when he became rector of the English College in Rome. Pope Leo XII then made him curator of Arabic manuscripts in the Vatican, and professor of Oriental languages at the Roman University. But in 1840 this brilliant scholar returned to England, where he did much to bridge the gap between the Oxford Movement and the English Catholic community.However in 1850 Wiseman found himself at the centre of a violent political storm when Pius IX named him first Archbishop of Westminster. Wiseman's coach was pelted with stones; the cry of 'Papal Aggression' was taken up in official circles; and it was only Wiseman's eloquent pamphlet Appeal to the English People which served to usher in a more tolerant attitude.Brian Fothergill's biography, first published in 1963, is a discerning study of the man who laid the foundations of the Catholic revival.

In the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature it says of James Reeves, 'His real achievement, however, lies in his poetry, which is generally regarded as the best British ''serious'' children's verse since Walter de la Mare - though the poems are usually far from serious in subject-matter.'In this complete edition, first published in 1973, the delight is two-fold as the poems are complemented by Edward Ardizzone's beautiful and witty illustrations.

Imogen Holst's Tune (Faber, 1962) is a searching enquiry into the invention of tune and at the same time a comprehensive anthology of tunes from folksong to the present day. Plainsong, street-cries, the songs of the English lutenists, Bach's dances, and Mozart's arias - whatever the origins and character of the tunes in question, Imogen Holst (daughter of the composer, Gustav Holst) has something fresh and revealing to say about them. And she does not confine herself to familiar ground. One of her most illuminating chapters is devoted to the music of India, where a raga can provide improvised 'tune' of several hours duration. This chapter is the result of her personal experience of studying music in India, and it is typical of her vivid approach to the subject. Her book is for everyone who likes to sing, play, whistle, hum or listen to a good tune.

It is difficult now to imagine the shock that this book caused when it was first published in 1932. The author was a teacher at a Cambridge college, an intensely serious man who had been seriously wounded by poison gas on the Western Front, and he was not disposed to suffer foolishness gladly. His opening sentences were arresting: 'Poetry matters little to the modern world. That is, very little of contemporary intelligence concerns itself with poetry'. What followed was nothing less than the welcoming of a revolution in English verse, set against the moral and social crisis that followed the trauma of the First World War. It was this situation, this feeling of breakdown and disorder, that gave such force to Leavis's dismissal of most late Romantic poetry and his welcoming of the modernists T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and of the writer who Leavis regarded as their forebear, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The tone of high moral urgency, and the message that the experience of literature could become an engagement with life that was almost a secular equivalent to religion, seemed new and abrasively refreshing. Leavis despised the reigning dilettantism in both poetry and criticism, and in this book he threw down the gauntlet to the establishment as he understood it. In the same year he founded the journal Scrutiny, and began his long career as the most formidably serious literary critic of his time.

This is a sad, strange and touchingly heroic book. It tells of a mad, misguided adventure: one man's attempt to conquer Mount Everest. Maurice Wilson belonged to the 'lost generation'. He fought in the First World War, winning the Military Cross, but found the transition to civilian life difficult. He led a restless, rootless life and suffered ill-health. This changed mysteriously in 1932 when through, it would seem, a combination of prayer and fasting he cured himself. His Mount Everest ambitions started to take shape. They could not have been more ambitious. His odyssey was to begin in Britain. He bought himself an airplane. He couldn't fly, was a poor student, but finally learnt the rudiments. Despite all the odds, and much official obstruction, he managed to fly to India. More obstacles followed, but on 21 March, 1934 Maurice Wilson and three Sherpas slipped out of Darjeeling disguises as Buddhist monks. Wilson's first attempt on Mount Everest was solo. It failed. He tried again this time with the three Sherpas. They made better progress initially. From the base camp, Wilson made two more attempts on the final ascent. A year later Eric Shipton's reconnaissance party found his body at the approaches to the North Col. They also found his diary: the final entry read, 'Off again, gorgeous day.' The diary provides an astonishing record of persistence, courage, and a faith that never wavered in the face of appalling hardship and adversity.Although this is a chronicle of failure, the achievement can still be marvelled at. Here was a man with no flying or mountaineering experience whatsoever who managed to fly from Britain to India and then nearly conquers Mount Everest : there are even those who speculate he might have done so but even without that fanciful embellishment it is an extraordinary story.This book, first published in 1957, has been out of print for a very long time. Its renewed availability will delight not just those interested in mountaineering but also connoisseurs of adventure stories.

It's easy to underestimate the eccentric, quietly spoken Inspector James Boswell Hodge Leonard, with his bicycle and his tweeds, and his superiors who make the mistake of doing so soon discover he's not too keen on toeing the Establishment line.When the grisly corpse of a traveller is found outside a Roman bath, Leonard's orders are to clear up the mess with no fuss, but he begins to kick over Bath's social dustbins and out tumbles decades of secrets and suspects, not smelling too sweetly...The rich and sadistic Montague James, controller of people's lives; Hilary, the former adult film star; Norma, the painter of controversial nudes; they all know more than they are revealing. Leonard's problem is to find the one person who knows the truth - before the rest do, and before the powers that be put the lids back on those dustbins...

First published in 1999, Secret Kingdom was the second panel in Francis Bennett's Cold War trilogy.'For all of us now the Cold War is history... What interested me as a writer was how we survived. What went on behind the scenes?... I went looking for my own fictional explanations for historical events... In Secret Kingdom, which takes place in Hungary in the dangerous summer months [of 1956] that led directly to the Revolution, I knew that the British ambassador's warnings of trouble building up had been ignored by the Foreign Office in London. Why? What were the consequences of such an extraordinary and irresponsible act?' Francis Bennett 'The Cold War here is not just a political but also a psychological landscape... In picking out a personal history from the greater tapestry unfolding in the background Bennett has produced a literary thriller of considerable merit.' The Times

'The best book on football ever written.' Franz Beckenbauer, winner of the World Cup as both player and manager.In Football Memories, Brian Glanville himself writes, 'The central character, Garry, was a Scottish inside-forward based on Danny Blanchflower. This, largely because the footballer had to be untypically intelligent and aware, as well as an accomplished performer. Danny, so fluent, so original, and in certain ways so flawed, seemed an ideal model. Yet he, or his surrogate, could not carry the whole book. I used various voices. His wife's. My own.'Ever since J. B. Priestley's pre-publication endorsement - 'I enjoyed this highly original novel' - praise has been constant:'This is a brilliant novel. Any footballer can see a little of himself in Gerry Logan, as I did when I first read it. The book tells what the pressures are like in the game, the temptations to which successful players are exposed and yet the human qualities tell us much about society and human nature in general.' Derek Dougan'The best novel on soccer I have ever read.' Daily Herald'Soars into first-class fiction.' The Spectator'An acid fable of our age, solid with expertise about football and its seamier secrets.' Daily Mail 'The whole world of big time soccer, with its glamour and bitter feuds, made very real.' Sunday Telegraph

To Horace Walpole's house at Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham, came a remarkable assortment of poets and writers, artists and antiquaries, politicians and society figures. Among them were Thomas Gray, whose great 'Elegy' might never have been published without Walpole's encouragement; that 'laughter-loving dame' Kitty Clive, the greatest comic actress of her day; Lady Suffolk who entertained Walpole with stories of the days when she was George II's mistress; the epicene John Chute, whose architectural knowledge and enthusiasm helped to inspire Strawberry Hill; the gentle Berry sisters, who comforted Walpole's old age; George Selwyn, celebrated for his wit, languor, and necrophilia. 'If Mr Selwyn calls', said Mr Fox on his death-bed, 'show him up. If I'm still alive I'll be glad to see him and if I'm dead he'll be glad to see me.' The most fascinating member of this circle was Horace Walpole himself. Son of Sir Robert, Member of Parliament for many years, author of the first Gothic romance, The Castle of Otranto, passionate collector, influential amateur of architecture and, above all, prince of English letter-writers, he emerges gradually but clearly through the eyes of his friends. Brian Fothergill, always an accomplished biographer, perhaps found his most congenial subject in this book: the result is a work as entertaining as it is informative.

A compassionate portrait of an elderly - and frustrated - woman adjusting to new town life and finding a new purpose in living.Illness forces Sylvia Calvert to live with her son Harold, a headmaster in Carshall New Town. At first, Sylvia cannot adjust to the jungle of supermarkets, 10-pin bowling alleys and recreation areas; to the committees and purposeful entertaining involved in the creation of a new society.Above all, Sylvia can't understand Harold's odd, thrusting idealism and the strange behaviour of her grandchildren.But a chance meeting and a family crisis give her the chance to fulfil herself ...

In one of his Independent pieces Miles Kington once referred to a volume of Edward Lear's limericks translated into French. Not an easy task, you might think, and in translating Alphonse Allais into English, Miles Kington set himself a similar challenge. He carried it off with panache. As Max Harrison said in The Times, '... has done a difficult job well, even preserving some of Allais's puns'.Alphonse Allais has been described as the greatest humorous writer ever. In the words of Lisa Appignanesi, 'Allais was a consummate absurdist. From an ordinary phenomenon, simple sentiment or situation, he would logically deduce the looniest, most macabre and most unexpected result ... His humour kept all Paris, high and low, waiting breathlessly for the paper which would carry his next tale ...'On first publication, in 1976, Clive James in the Observer said 'Allais has been dead 70 years but his mocking tone ensures him a permanently relevant after-life'. And John Sturrock in the New Statesman, 'Allais stands, along with Jarry, at the head of the most dazzling and highly educated tradition of French humour, as witty as it is whimsical'. Faber Finds offers this rare book as a tribute not only to Alphonse Allais but also Miles Kington, two great humorists in tandem.

The Wind in the Willows needs no introduction - children have enjoyed the exploits of its characters for generations. Few would guess that its author, Kenneth Grahame, was a tortured soul. Marriage to the predatory Elspeth Thomson, when both seemed destined for the single life, was a shared fantasy of invented truth. Out of that union came a catastrophically spoiled son, 'Mouse', for whom that greatest of children's stories was written. It was the child's tragedy that he was sucked into the unreality of his parents' lives and did not survive it, ending his life in suicide.Alison Prince brings her own highly acclaimed expertise as a children's writer to this remarkably perceptive biography of Kenneth Grahame. Drawing on hitherto unpublished material she uncovers layer upon layer of Grahame's personality to reveal the truth behind the myth of this intriguing man, 'the tortured soul of Mr Toad'.'Alison Prince describes the grim story of Grahame's marriage and fatherhood squarely and sensitively.' Independent'A meaty, well-constructed biography.' Allan Massie Daily Telegraph

Does the habit of taking drugs make authors write better, or worse, or differently? Does it alter the quality of their consciousness, shape their imagery, influence their technique? For the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century, many of whom experimented with opium and some of whom were addicted to it, this was an important question, but it has never been fully answered. In this study Alethea Hayter examines the work of five writers - Crabbe, Coleridge, De Quincey, Wilkie Collins and Francis Thompson - who were opium addicts for many years, and of several other writers - notably Keats, Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire, but also Walter Scott, Dickens, Mrs Browning, James Thomson and others - who are known to have taken opium at times. The work of these writers is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century opinion about the uses and dangers of opium, and of Romantic ideas on the creative imagination, on dreams and hypnagogic visions, and on imagery, so that the idiosyncrasies of opium-influenced writing can be isolated from their general literary background. The examination reveals a strange and miserable region of the mind in which some of the greatest poetic imaginations of the nineteenth century were imprisoned.

First published by Faber & Faber in 1940, A Crook in the Furrow was described by the Manchester Evening News as 'like no other detective story. Mr Street's plots and stratagems, his devices are well up to the most exacting professional standards. As a background for it there is Mr Street's great love and knowledge of the English countryside'. Detective Inspector 'Coincidence' Charles Jenks has been investigating a hunch that Dr Larne of 223 Harley Street has been committing crimes. What these crimes are, however, he isn't sure, but Dr Larne's name has occurred too frequently in reference accounts of suspicious circumstances for 'Coincidence' Charles to think that he is perfectly innocent. As ever, 'Coincidence' Charles is right. Dr Larne has been supplying drugs using his Harley Street practice and two unknown accomplices, Peggy and Frank Young. Believing that 'Coincidence' Charles is onto their scheme, Larne persuades the couple to move to the country and set up as 'honest' farmers in order to continue their growing business away from the prying eyes of 'Coincidence' Charles. Can Charles discover what is really going on, or will the country straighten them out? After all, 'Wiltshire won't have crooks in her furrows'.

The East End as an idea is known to every Londoner, and to many others, though its boundaries are vague. Alan Palmer's historical overview of the area (first published in 1989 and revised in 2000) takes its extent to be the traditional limits of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, Hoxton and Shoreditch, the docklands and their overflow into West Ham and East Ham. And at the heart of the East End lies Spitalfields, home to a transient, often radical and hard-working population. Though it is often seen as London's centre of industry and poverty, in comparison to the well-to-do West End, the East End has always been a diverse place: in the seventeenth century, Hackney was a pleasant country retreat; Stepney and the docklands a bustling world of sailors and merchants. The book traces the development of the area from these roots, through the nineteenth century - when the East End became notorious as the home of radicals, exiled revolutionaries and the very poor, its crowded streets the scene of murder, riot and cholera -to the bombing of the first and second world war; and the subsequent decline and regeneration of the twentieth century.

As Alan Palmer himself writes in his preface, 'Alexander 1, ruler of Russia for the first quarter of the nineteenth century, is remembered today mainly on three counts: as the Tsar who refused to make peace with the French when Moscow fell in 1812; as the idealist who sought to bind Europe's sovereigns in a Holy Alliance in 1815; and as the Emperor who died - or gave the impression of having died - at the remote southern seaport of Taganrog in the winter of 1825. Recent interest has concentrated , perhaps excessively, on the third of these dramatic episodes akthough it is natural that the epic years of the struggle with Napoleon should continue to excite the historical imagination.'He has been dubbed 'The Enigmatic Tsar'. There are many contrasting opinions of him. Thomas Jefferson declared 'A more virtuous man, I believe, does no exist, nor one who is more enthusiastically devoted to better the condition of mankind. Castlereagh thought well of him, too, but both Metternich and Napoleon considered him inconsistent and untrustworthy. And Pushkin famously described him as 'a Sphinx who carried his riddle with him to the tomb.' an assessment even more piquant if it is true, as some maintain, his tomb in empty.With his customary blend of meticulous scholarship and agreeable writing, Alan Palmer provides the most balanced and engaging portrait imaginable.'A pleasure to read and unlikely to be replaced for many years' Philip Ziegler, The Times'Excellent . . . a major biographical achievement, a notable contribution to our understanding of this still enigmatic monarch' Robert Blake, Spectator

Isabella Bird was a woman of remarkable gifts. In 1872, at the age of forty, this rather earnest daughter of a country parson abandoned the rectory nest and began her pioneering journeys to some of the most inhospitable corners of the world. Undismayed by discomfort or danger she was to spend almost thirty years travelling - to the Rocky Mountains, the Sandwich Isles, to Japan, Malaya, Kashmir and Tibet, to Persia, Korea and China - where an indomitable spirit, an unassuming cordiality and, above all, a limitless capacity for being interested won her universal welcome. Her accounts of her experiences became best-selling books and established for Isabella Bird a reputation as one of the great travel writers of her day.'Miss Barr has her measure. She and Miss Bird are well suited. The style of both is fresh, energetic, visual, making an enchanting book.'Evening Standard'Rich and riotous as her intrepid heroine moves at the speed of a silent movie through landscapes lusher than any technicolour.'Times Literary Supplement'A rare book.'Sunday Telegraph

In the author's own words this is a book about 'chaps and maps'. More formally. The Chancelleries of Europe is a study of traditional diplomacy at its peak of influence in the nineteenth-century and the first years of the twentieth. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 the five Great Powers - Austria, Britain, France, Prussia and Russia - established a system of international intercourse that safeguarded the world from major war for exactly a hundred years. The successive crises that challenged this supranational system - the unification of Italy and Germany, the scramble for colonies in Africa, and for trade concessions in Asia, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of Japan - are well-known. Less attention has been given to the way the system functioned and to changes imposed on its character by the spread of speedier communications. It is these gaps in our understanding of the international politics of the century that the author seeks to fill.The book therefore studies the clashes of personality between crowned heads of the old empires and between rival statesmen and ambassadors seeking advancement. It compares the growth of personnel and specialist departments in the various foreign ministries, assesses the impact of domestic politics on external affairs, the power of the pressure groups like the (British) China Association and the (Russian) Far Eastern Committee, the proto-spin fed to favoured newspapers and, in contrast, the growing unease of press and public at 'hidden' negotiations and the concealment of diplomatic expedients and alliances. But the book also notes changes in the way diplomacy was conducted in the wake of technological inventions such as the semaphore towers of the early years and the electric telegraph and undersea cables of the second half of the century. Moments of high drama, skullduggery and bathos prove that the reading of diplomatic history is not the dull, dreary drudge many abhorred in their schooldays.

Originally published in 1999, The Haunt, set in a seedy, decaying hotel on the Cornish coast, was to be the final entry in A. L. Barker's brilliant fifty-year writing career. 'The Haunt is the novel that A. L. Barker had just finished [in 1998] when she was struck down by a disabling illness... [It] is probably her best... It is an examination of what being haunted means, and whether we can do anything about it. Auden once said that there is nothing to be done about it. We must sit it out. This is grim advice. But if A. L. Barker is saying this too - and I think she is - she doesn't say it grimly. She says it lightly, not cynically but hilariously. She understands that there can be pleasure alongside unease: the delicious first stirrings of infidelity, the comforts of offered love to the old and ridiculous. She knows us all.' Jane Gardam, Spectator

'An extraordinary achievement.' A. S. ByattJohn Brown's Body, first published in 1969, was A.L. Barker's fourth novel and was shortlisted for the second annual Booker Prize in 1970.Marise Tomelty is the young wife of a travelling salesman, who dislikes sex and is terrified of open spaces. Ralph Shilling, a dealer in pesticides, lives in the flat above the Tomeltys'. One day Marise's husband casually mentions that he recognises Ralph as John Brown: a man acquitted, for lack of evidence, of the gruesome double murder of two sisters. Nevertheless, Marise encourages Ralph's attentions, intoxicated by a heady mix of passion and fear.'She is formidable, and from a bare corner of human relations gathers a rich harvest.' Adam Mars-Jones'It would be hard to find anyone who chooses words more exactly or constructs with more precision.' Penelope Fitzgerald

The Joy-Ride and After was A.L. Barker's third collection of shorter pieces, first published in 1963. It offers three novellas, linked by certain recurrent characters and by their variations on the themes of loneliness and insecurity. The first tells of what has led to a young garage-hand 'borrowing' his employer's car, and of the disastrous consequences that ensue. In the second, a betrayed wife loses her memory after an accident, and finds herself on a barge with an old reprobate. The third concerns the tribulations of a canteen manager who has an inscrutable boss and an extravagant wife. Whether they live in slum tenement or suburban semi-detached, these 'ordinary' people become alive and phenomenal to us through the force and sympathy of Barker's imagination.

A. L. Barker's debut story collection appeared in 1947 and won the inaugural Somerset Maugham prize, instantly marking her out as a remarkable new talent. Each story describes a crisis in life; each reveals the impact of experience upon innocence, or vice versa.'[Barker's] remarkable descriptive powers, her feeling for the exact word and the right combination of adjectives are most satisfyingly applied to the evocation of landscape... Barker writes with a subtlety and precision which are as delightful as they are rare.' Times Literary Supplement'This collection of eight short stories... introduces an already assured and subtle stylist... There is little pity here, but - if restrained - considerable terror and tragedy, and a precision of observation and treatment which qualify this collection for a critical, fastidious audience.' Kirkus Reviews

Malcolm Lowry was the troubled author of Under the Volcano (1947), a brilliant novel about the last day of an alcoholic former British consul on the Mexican Day of the Dead, the manuscript of which Lowry rescued from the flames when his fisherman's shack burned down in 1944. Lowry's other books were not always so lucky: his first novel, Ultramarine (1930), was stolen after four years' composition and resurrected from a carbon copy; another manuscript, In Ballast to the White Sea, was destroyed in the 1944 fire. An early draft of In Ballast was discovered this century and published in 2014. Lowry's life, like his work, was often lost to chaos; Gordon Bowker's 1994 biography is a masterful account of a life spent adrift.

In 1972, a break-in was foiled at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC. Within days a connection had been made with the White House and President Nixon's closest aides. It unleashed one of the greatest scandals in modern American politics and ended with Nixon's humiliating resignation. David Frost's interviews with Richard Nixon drew the largest audience ever for a news interview. Could this British talk-show host, with no known political convictions and a playboy reputation, be the one to elicit an apology from the man who committed one of the biggest felonies in American political history? Frost/Nixon premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in August 2006.

First published in English in 1980, this important early memoir of Gustav Mahler is by Natalie Bauer-Lechner (1858-1921), a viola player and close and devoted friend of Mahler until his marriage to Alma Schindler in 1902. She visited him in Hamburg and frequented his circle in Vienna, also accompanying him and his family on a number of the summer vacations during which the Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies came into being, together with many of the Wunderhorn songs. Compiled from Bauer-Lechner's private journal, these Recollections are a vital, invaluable record of Mahler's personal, professional and creative life during the last decade of the nineteenth century. A large part of the book recounts, at first hand, conversations with Mahler concerning his works and his ideas about performance (both in the opera-house and on the concert platform.)

First published in 1954 as South to Sardinia, this account of a summer journey in the early 1950s sees Alan Ross alternating the past and present of a strange island whose interior, especially, had been only rarely visited at that point. His descriptions of the landscape and local customs and mores (including billiards, 'one of the great Sardinian occupations') are interspersed with tales of a cast of characters who might have come out of Boccaccio, adding up to a memorable evocation.'An alert and sensitive travel book... Alan Ross has an exceptional descriptive gift.' Listener'So closely packed with good writing that it requires to be read slowly, as Mr Ross travelled.' Time and Tide'He is a specialist in the vin triste... a delightful offbeat.' Cyril Connolly, Sunday Times'An exceptionally good book by any standard.' TLS'A work of art and imagination.' Times

Set in the world of a large advertising company Storyboard focuses on the decision by the agency's clients, Hoppness, Silch & Co. ('the soap people') to destroy one of their competitor's products. Into this scheme are thrust copyeditor Sophia Last and her boss Hugh Grover, as well as over-conscientious Account Executive Keith Bates, his wife Sylvia and their son Stephen. Also caught up in these events is Ralph Cavell, a young research graduate turned journalist. Storyboard is not primarily a novel about advertising. It is an exploration of how people can be corrupted, and ultimately destroyed, by their desire for money and power and how even those people who start out with good intentions can be misled from their original purpose. It is also a critique of powerful corporations that are controlled and organised by the greed of those who operate them.An absorbing and adult novel, Storyboard cemented John Bowen's reputation as a mature and intelligent novelist when it was first published in 1960.

First published in 1959 The Centre of the Green is John Bowen's third novel. The story centres around the Baker family: the father Justin is a retired Colonel; the mother, Teresa, is over-possessive and refuses to admit that her sons have grown-up; the sons Julian and Charles - one is a married advertising copywriter with a penchant for extra-marital affairs while the other is withdrawn and suicidal, desperately looking for human contact in the vast anonymity of London.It is Julian's involvement with a seventeen-year-old girl that sparks the chain of events that eventually encompasses the whole family. The scene shifts between Devonshire, London and Majorca as each member of the family searches for a resolution to the impasse into which they have drifted and struggle to regain the family ties that they once had. A subtle, intelligent and compassionate novel The Centre of the Green was commended by the Observer for its 'admirable vitality', while the Spectator described it as 'a series of expertly managed shocks'.

In John Bowen's The Birdcage Peter Ash and Norah Palmer have been living together for nine years. Having never seen the point in getting married they are the epitome of a modern successful career-oriented couple; Peter is the compere for a series of 'art' films and Norah is the Script Editor for the Drama Department of a commercial television company. Why then when holidaying in Venice does Peter decide to break up their long-lasting relationship? What happens to their order and sense of self when he succeeds? By turns wildly funny and frightening The Birdcage is a novel about the end of a love affair, the repercussions and the emotional fallout. A host of brilliantly created characters people the book, including Bunty Bates the policewoman, and Edward Laverick, a playwright who finds himself the object of a hunt. Bowen creates a world that his readers can relate to and analyses the social and psychological end of a relationship. At times comical and tragic The Birdcage remains an original and exciting novel 44 years after its first publication in 1964.